Liner Notes by PEK

Every once in a while, a new ensemble gets started at Evil Clown.  Sometimes the new unit has a particular aesthetic problem, and an appropriate band name assigned defined in advance.  For example, Metal Chaos Ensemble started as a duet between me and Yuri Zbitnov as soon as we started to work with newly acquired metal instruments in 2015, and Turbulence was formed to feature groups of horn players – sometime as only horn players and sometimes with bass and drums.  Sometimes the new unit is spun off from an existing ensemble with some variation or different set of resources.  Simulacrum was spun off from Metal Chaos Ensemble to include even more electronic instrumentation and signal processing and to not require a drummer.

Sometimes the new unit comes about because new players join the roster and contribute to a session by an existing ensemble, and it is clear their contribution adds a distinctive voice to the Evil Clown palette which deserves a new band name.  Such is the case with Neurodivergent.  Count Robot, DNA Girl and Tim Mungenast played on two Expanse records in 2023 (Swathe in March and Gamut in July).  They bring an odd sensibility that involves improvised spoken word banter between the three of them and a more pop-culture oriented use of guitar, mandolin and electronics than is typical in Evil Clown ensembles.  For the third set featuring these three relative newbies, I rolled out the new band name, Neurodivergent, to explore combinations of their aesthetic as a group of players with a long history with various combinations of players from the Evil Clown Roster. 

While most of the Evil Clown ensembles perform strictly instrumental music that does not contain words, a few of the bands do use words and I like how the text provides an entry point for the audience to access the music.  Metal Chaos Ensemble uses text from literature and movies and Axioms uses the Poetry of the amazing poet Jane SpokenWord who recites her words in small ensembles which also feature the amazing bass playing of her husband Albey onBass.  In these settings, the words come from fixed text, but the delivery and the choice of which words and when to place them are improvised.  In Neurodivergent, the improvisation of the words is on another level… None of the text is fixed in advance; all the words are improvised in reaction to the Wacky Banter of the others.  This music contains a great deal of playfulness and humor which is often lacking in the world of pure improvisation.  I have long valued humor in music as a method of engaging people and I think this band is the best example so far of an Evil Clown ensemble which centers humor as a critical element.

Monsters Gonna Monster continues the theme of Monsters and Science that has run through the Wacky Banter of several of the Neurodivergent outings.  The last set, The Point of Science is Making Explosions, was the first where I set the title of the piece prior to the performance and the title was a clear launching point for the banter.  The first couple of sessions were titled beforehand, but with the kind of abstract titles that I generally preassign to the works of other Evil Clown ensembles. Then I decided that I would promote the performances as Title TBD and the next several albums were titled following the performances based on themes that arose during the purely improvised dialog. Between The Point of Science is Making Things Explode and this new set, Monsters Gonna Monster, I can see there is a real advantage to preselecting a title as a launching point since it gives me and the other banterers some time in advance to think about what we might say. The words are still completely improvised, and we do not do any detailed planning, and since there are several of us performing speaking parts, the interactions provoke all kinds of unexpected results. However, a more carefully considered theme results in a through-line for the narrative over the duration of the piece.  I also like the tension that occurs between this narrative and the more absurd improvised interjections.

Anyway, we had a terrific Livestream performance.  I really like this set and I bet you do too…

PEK 6/29/2025